Misplaced Pages

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Main Page and pageviews discussion

Question: The info must exist as to how many pageviews the search page vs the main page gets. If the search page significantly outnumbers the main page, why spend all the time and efford on the main page? DYK is clearly a credit-seeking process, but I dont follow ITN so dont know if it is a similar process there. Effort vs reward should surely carry large weight. Not to mention the take up of administrative time that could be better spent. (Not to mention Fram and TRM would get a break from fixing constant errors that will cease to exist) Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:20, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

The search-only page probably doesn't get that many views; it's only displayed if you enter "Misplaced Pages" in the address bar without specifying a language.

The Main Page gets about 18 million hits per day, but that's an artefact of the fact that typing "Misplaced Pages" into a search engine or clicking the logo on any page takes you there, rather than that people are actually interested in it. The most prominent item on the Main Page—TFA—generally gets around 20,000–30,000 views per day*, while when it comes to DYK getting more than 25,000 views is considered so extraordinary there's a special page dedicated to articles which have managed it. This implies that at most about 1%–2% of visitors to the main page are actually looking at the content of the main page.

If I were the WMF, I'd replace the main page with this proposed redesign by Guy Macon for a week and see what happens. That would still allow all the TFA, TFL, OTD, DYK, ITN clutter to continue as normal but it would only be shown to people who wanted to see it. My prediction would be no impact at all on readership numbers, and that while it would cause howls of protest from the MMORPG-ers who treat getting on the main page as the winning of Misplaced Pages Points, we wouldn't get a single complaint from any actual readers—the general public really could not give a shit "that while Inger Hanmann created enamels for the Copenhagen Airport, her daughter Charlotte made processed photographs of the urban environment?". ‑ Iridescent 10:10, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

*There are some TFAs that get page views in six figures, but those are few and far between and often the result either of the topic being heavily covered in the news on that day or of Google Doodles, meaning the traffic will be coming direct from searches and won't be an artefact of being displayed on the main page. Other than Nick Drake (run on the day of the SOPA blackout, when the main page was itself the subject of significant news coverage so more people than usual were looking at it) and the April Fools TFAs, the only TFAs in the entire history of Misplaced Pages to get more than 200,000 views which didn't relate to a current news story or that day's Google Doodle were Emma Watson, Lynching of Jesse Washington, D. B. Cooper, Daniel Lambert and Gropecunt Lane; you can literally count them on the fingers of one hand. All of those except Watson were unusually interesting stories, which probably got more traffic from "hey, look at this" on Twitter and Reddit than they did from the MP itself.

I would be ecstatic to avoid main page day with any FAs I'd worked on. And I only use DYK as a way to get more eyes on an article (like GAN or FAC)... I long ago quit being excited about things I worked on appearing on the main page. All it generally means is a bunch of crap and bs. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:53, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

I think we should do something along the lines of or possibly (note: you have to use the up and down arrows -- no newfangled "scroll bars" here!). It's clearly what a lot of people want our main page to look like... :(

Would anyone be interested in creating an RfC at (possibly at Misplaced Pages:Village pump (proposals)?) proposing that we replace the current main page with User:Guy Macon/Simple Main Page for 1% (randomly chosen) of our visitors for a week, followed by 10% of our visitors for a week if there are no obvious problems? The statistics on that would give us a solid answer to the question "does all of this DYK, OTD, etc. material really need to clutter the main page, or would having it as subpages linked from the main page work just as well?" Such an RfC would have to address the fact that Misplaced Pages:Perennial proposals#Redesign the main page claims that the idea of redesigning the main page has been "rejected by the community several times in the past" --Guy Macon (talk) 18:19, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

I think it would be well worth considering, although you'd almost certainly have to fight off an organized attempt to block it by certain elements (particularly at DYK and TFP) who see mainpage appearances as some kind of affirmation of their identity. Before this goes any further, paging our friendly neighborhood Community Liaison (Product Development), Wikimedia Foundation to ask if this is a change which would be blocked by the WMF before ever reaching the A/B test, since there's no point going any further if it will be strangled in the cradle. ‑ Iridescent 22:49, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Let me see who's made it home from Wikimania. Changing a page that gets millions of hits might be Kind Of a Big Deal. At minimum, Ops' Performance team (that's User:Krinkle and friends) would have to agree that the servers probably wouldn't fall over. We'd also have to find out whether the infrastructure currently exists for this (I'm not certain that it does). I don't know if any other teams would have a reason to care. I'll find out. Ping me in a couple of days if you haven't heard from me by then. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:24, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

In the meantime, I would very much appreciate it if other editors would review my "list of links and a searchbox" proposal to make sure that I chose the right links. Also, can the wording be improved? I wouldn't want anyone to reject the basic concept because of a poor choice on my part. Please post any comments on User talk:Guy Macon/Simple Main Page. Thanks! --Guy Macon (talk) 08:01, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Per this thread, it looks like the point may be moot, since it appears that this design—which somehow has achieved the difficult feat of being more cluttered and ugly than the existing design—is going to be imposed by fiat regardless of whether anyone actually wants it. ‑ Iridescent 09:26, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Hello, I wanted to provide some context that may benefit this endeavor. The Misplaced Pages.org portal sees about 14 million page views a day. Less than the Main_Page on the English Misplaced Pages, but the portal is not language-specific. ~90% of visits to the portal are direct. I've also shared this thread with the Discovery department to make them aware. Hope that helps. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 17:00, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

CKoerner (WMF), thanks for that; I wasn't aware there was any way to count its views (and certainly wasn't aware its views were so high). I do think a full-scale A/B test of a minimal mainpage design would be a worthwhile exercise—the working assumption of most main page redesign proposals has always been that all the clutter on the existing main page needs to be included on any proposed redesign, and thus the proposals are just differing opinions on how a series of cluttered boxes should be arranged. If there's not in fact a need for it all to be included, it radically affects how discussions about Misplaced Pages's look and feel ought to proceed.

In an ideal world, I'd love to see a cookie-controlled main page where readers (not just logged-in editors) choose which elements to display on the main page. People with no interest in any "Today's Featured Whatever" could restrict the page to a google.com style blank page with a searchbar; people with an interest in general knowledge could leave the page at default settings and it would look like it does now; people with a strong interest in trains could set it to show today's featured train, and so on. This would allow people to customise the main page to show information in which they're actually interested, rather than information in which the small cliques who control the assorted corners of the main page feel they ought to be interested, it would put an end to the constant "the main page has a systemic bias towards/against (insert country)" complaints since readers in New Zealand, South Africa and all the other countries which argue (with some justification) that they're underrepresented could choose to be shown Portal:New Zealand/Selected article, Portal:South Africa/Selected article etc instead of the vanilla Featured Article, and it would revive the generally moribund Misplaced Pages Portals since it would provide a strong incentive for portals to provide interesting content and to update themselves regularly. By looking at who chose to show/hide which elements, it would also make it possible for the first time to measure which aspects of Misplaced Pages are actually of interest to readers beyond a crude pageview count, and save people wasting time on things which the readers don't want. I appreciate this would be a major cultural change and would generate an not insignificant extra server load, but it's not insurmountable, and I do think a drastic reconsideration of the purpose of the main page makes more sense than the tinkering with formatting seen at Misplaced Pages:Main page redesign proposals and Misplaced Pages:Main Page alternatives. ‑ Iridescent 23:04, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

We seem to be talking about two different pages. Chris is working with the Discovery team on the 'main page' for www.wikipedia.org, not for the Main Page at en.wikipedia.org. One of the changes that Discovery has already made to the www. page is making the search box bigger, which is right in line with what you want to do here. Their next proposal seems to be making it simpler. And, importantly, they just ran an A/B test that showed (for www., which of course might not be the same results as for en.) that simpler = measurably more interaction.

So I have asked around a couple of times this week, and the story seems to be that Ops would have to agree to an A/B test, that Discovery might have the tools to do an A/B test on different designs for the Main Page here, and that Reading may be interested. It's easy to figure out which Ops people to talk to: questions about performance issues go to the Performance team. For Discovery, I think you want to start with Deskana. So far, I'm interpreting Reading's interest as "please send us a copy of the results" rather than "we'd like to work on this", but I'm only guessing, so I may be wrong. In the meantime, Deskana is probably the next person to talk to. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:58, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF), I wasn't clear; my first paragraph above was about the www.wikipedia.org portal, and the second was a more general musing about the feasibility of a preference-controlled main page. I agree entirely that simpler will lead to more and better interaction—there's a reason the websites of the Amazons and eBays of the world, whose business models depend on getting the balance between "getting people where they want to go" and "showing people stuff in which they might be interested" correct, have spent the last decade getting steadily less cluttered.

I don't know how official Talk:Main Page#The new Main Page is, but given the "this is going to happen regardless of how many objections and how little support it has" statement I assume it must be endorsed by SF, in which case presumably the point is moot at least for en-wikipedia, if there's an agreement that "keep everything that's already there and add even more clutter to it" is the way to go. ‑ Iridescent 08:23, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The new main page czar did say "your proposal has not gained any significant traction ... if you actually were to get a 1000 signatures, no doubt it would seriously be considered", so I say we should test that assertion by putting together a proposal for the one-week one-percent of users test of my proposed page and see if we can get those thousand signatures supporting running the test. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:48, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

I'd support that (again with the "if the WMF devs are willing" proviso; if you go to the trouble of rounding up a huge group, and are then told it's not possible for technical reasons, you're just going to annoy a huge bunch of people). As a variation on a theme someone's raised on the proposal talkpage, it might make more sense to make the change for 100% of users on a smaller wiki for a month and see if the number of readers varies wildly in either direction. That way, one doesn't have to mess around with A/B analysis, but can just look at whether the number of pageviews falls/rises when the new-look page is put in place and when it goes back to the old version. The obvious testbeds would be something like Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, where the reader numbers are high enough not to be impacted by "both the regular readers are on vacation" issues, and where every editor can reasonably be assumed to speak fluent idiomatic English so can shout at the devs if something goes wrong without having to rely on translators.

To get the change made here, the route I'd take would be to canvass the opinions of as many well-regarded editors as you can think of before then. People are far more likely to be swayed by support or opposition from the Newyorkbrads and Slimvirgins of the world than they are by the pondlife who hang round Jimbo's talkpage and will oppose anything on general principle, so if they're going to oppose you want to hear their reasons beforehand so you can try to address their concerns. (You're not going to get 1000 supports, so don't set that as a marker since it just gives ammunition to those who want to block the proposal who'll be able to say you failed to meet your own promises. The only times in Misplaced Pages history that 1000 people have supported anything have all been massively-publicized major votes.)

Of course, with my cynical hat on, given that the new self-appointed Pope of the Main Page has redefined "consensus" as "anything one person wants to do provided they have the moral strength not to allow anyone else's opinion to sway their purpose", you could just unilaterally change it to whatever the hell you want. Given that he's about to redesign the sixth most viewed page on the entire internet based on a "consensus" of himself and a driveby support from an IP, he can hardly complain. ‑ Iridescent 18:16, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

So I finally managed to get the right questions and the right people in the same place at the same time, and the answer is disappointing. The short story is that the tools to do this properly don't exist, and creating them would require a significant investment of dev time, which is not likely to be forthcoming any time soon.

The fact that these tools don't exist has already caused problems for other projects, so that investment may happen in the future. However, given that the fiscal year began seven days ago, and given the "that's an #Epic task" reactions, I do not expect work on this to start for at least another year, if then.

There might be ways to fake parts of this (e.g., post an alternative for a couple of minutes per hour, and use redirects to track click-through rates), but the data might not be usable, especially if you're looking for a small change.

I'm sorry about this. Personally, I wish that we could run this test. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:05, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Per my comments in the #Gadget help? section below (which I've moved up and attached to this thread, as it's all regarding the same issue), I think the way to go regarding testing would probably be to persuade one of the smaller wikipedias to serve a s guinea-pig for a month, and see what impact it has on reader numbers.

Part of the issue at play here, I think, is a fundamental divide regarding the purpose of the Main Page. There are some people who see its purpose as helping people find what they're looking for as quickly and easily as possible, and others who see it as a mechanism to teach readers about what Misplaced Pages does and how it does it. The two positions aren't really compatible, and websites with far greater resources than Misplaced Pages have struggled to square the circle of combining "second-guessing what the reader is looking for" and "making the reader aware of what else is on offer". It doesn't help that (as with other discussions regarding Misplaced Pages's appearance, from the Manual of Style to Visual Editor) the main page redesign proposals have historically attracted some of Misplaced Pages's most vocal assholes, so a lot of people who probably have something useful to contribute won't go near them. ‑ Iridescent 15:08, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Neutral notification if anyone is still following this thread

Draft talk:Main Page#RfC: Main page update ‑ Iridescent 17:22, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Gadget help?

At it was opined that "2135 gadget users seem to think the new page is a good idea." I would like to explore the possibility of making my proposal at User:Guy Macon/Simple Main Page into a gadget. I an completely unfamiliar with this area of Misplaced Pages and don't even know whether I am suggesting something stupid. Needless to say, I want to do everything right as far as getting approval/consensus for such a gadget. Ping User:SMcCandlish: got any advice for me on this?

A bit of background: I have years of programming experience, but it is 99% in the following areas: Tiny embedded assembly language programs that run on microcontrollers with 256 bytes of RAM total. managing teams of engineers and developers creating hardware and programs in C or C++ to test aircraft components. So far I have avoided anything resembling a Misplaced Pages bot, gadget, template, etc. as being completely outside of my field of expertise. I think it may be time for me to change that. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:04, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Don't take "2135 gadget users" as some kind of demonstration of mass appeal; that's just more Edokter bullshit. The nature of Misplaced Pages means that there will always be some users who will test any gadget (some of whom then abandon their accounts or get blocked with the gadget still switched on, leading to that account being permanently shown as using the gadget). When you actually look at the data Edokter's gadget is one of the least popular gadgets on Wikipedis, despite his putting it into Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets and thus showing it as an option to every single user on Misplaced Pages.

I don't really know a great deal about the technicalities and procedures of the gadget namespace. I'm not sure I've ever installed a gadget in my life, and I've certainly never edited one—I try to keep my settings as near to the default as possible, to ensure that whatever I'm seeing is what the readers will see. MZMcBride always seems to know about things like this. Per my comments in the earlier thread, it would probably make sense to to speak to WhatamIdoing and/or Deskana about what the WMF's take will be since there's no point working on something that they'll veto.

On a purely practical note, making your version into a workable gadget would probably be more complicated than Edokter's version. Edokter's version may superficially look different, but is in practice just an extremely clunky reskin without any significant content change, whereas yours is a set of links to allow the individual elements to be viewed separately. WP:TFA, WP:ITN and all the other elements aren't designed with readers viewing them separately in mind, and you'd need either to create stand-alone pages, or have a mechanism for making the links point to {{Misplaced Pages:Today's featured article/{{#time:F j, Y}} etc, neither of which will be a superficial matter and both of which would add an extra layer of complexity.

Given that it's looking obvious that there's little support for clearing away the clutter altogether and you'll probably at a minimum need to keep TFA transcluded—and that getting rid of the other elements while keeping TFA will lead to increased prominence for TFA and in turn prompt a furious blowback from FA editors—it's possibly not worth the effort tilting at this particular windmill. I do think the suggestion on the talkpage of rolling your design out to the smaller Wikipedias as a way of reducing the backlogs on their Main Pages, which can then in turn act as a testbed as to whether readers (as opposed to editors) will be actively hostile to the change, is a good one. ‑ Iridescent 07:43, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: Maybe try simple.wp: first? I dunno, though; the "we did this at the Foo-language Misplaced Pages, so en.wiki should do it too" argument is not always persuasive. There have been a few cases (mostly from de.wiki), but this argument often falls on deaf ears, and en.wiki has a long history of leading, not following. As for the ping to an advice request: I'm not a gadget developer yet, so I'm not sure I'd have anything to suggest, on the tech side. Regarding the general idea, I haven't really been clear in my mind on whether the Simple Main Page thing is proposed as a demo of what content would be available there, to be styled later, or is meant to represent the finished product more literally, nor whether it's meant as an alternative (kind of a portal-in-a-gadget) or a replacement. If it's meant to represent the final product (whether portal or replacement), I think it's too austere, but I can see a lot of users, especially mobile ones appreciating the "leanified" content structure of the page (i.e., from a function not just form perspective, though the form in the broad sense has much to do with why it could be helpful, even if the style, at the detail level, is more like a 1996 website). As for overall improving the Main Page in general, I'll paraphrase-by-screenshot what George Carlin said about US state mottoes: "Somewhere between 'Live Free or Die!' and 'Famous Potatoes', the truth lies. Probably, it's a little closer to 'Famous Potatoes'."  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼  14:50, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

I got up enough of a head of steam to finally write up some thoughts

You might conceivably be interested in my latest maundering in user space. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:43, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

On the specific issue of Drmies I probably shouldn't comment, since I don't believe I'm currently on his Christmas card list.

I've been annoying the deletion tag-bombers recently by going through CAT:CSD and de-tagging those which don't actually qualify for WP:CSD#A7 (which is actually extremely specific as to when it can be used) before the usual suspects can run their "delete all" userscript (I've been deleting all those which do deserve it, don't get me wrong). While it's fairly well known that I'm no fan of shitty stubs and think most of the South Street, Bromley—style hyperstubs would be more usefully merged into lists, it's easy to forget that almost every good article began its existence as a bad article. Misplaced Pages's "create enough sewage to fertilise the flowers" may be (deservedly) derided as an academic approach, but in getting coverage for topics which wouldn't be covered in a traditional encyclopedia it works considerably better than any other approach. Paging SV, Blofeld and OR (no, the other one), all of whom may have something to say either here or at User talk:Yngvadottir/A Case Study.

I may be being unfair on Wikipediocracy—I haven't had many dealings with this incarnation—but I'm not sure this is negative enough for them to be interested. The impression I get is that while the old WR certainly had its share of creepy weirdos and semicoherent bores with severe cases of verbal diarrhoea, it also generally took a "what are the problems with Misplaced Pages and is it possible to fix them?" tone (neatly summarised by Greg's old I really loved the original idea behind Misplaced Pages userpage), whereas in its WPO incarnation it does a better job of keeping out the creepy weirdos, but seems to approach everything with the base assumption "Misplaced Pages is inherently evil and anyone trying to fix it is part of the problem". ‑ Iridescent 21:32, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Actually, paging User:Pigsonthewing as well. While I disagree profoundly with him on many things, there's probably nobody more experienced with the kind of situation you describe. ‑ Iridescent 22:12, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

This reminds me of an episode of the old "Misplaced Pages Weekly" podcast, in which a group of editors created a new article in real-time, and the new article was tagged for either CSD or AfD (I forget which) while the first draft was still being written. I've addressed a couple of actual or suggested instances of newbie-unfriendliness this week, ranging from this absolutely awful block to this question. Was this club (of Wikipedians who aren't driven away early in their careers) always this hard to get into?

Yngvadottir, if you ever need a copy of any deleted material for a reason such as adding info from an old version to a current article, please feel free to ask me (or I'm sure any of dozens of other people).

Iridescent, on a completely separate note (and so feel free to subthread this), I've been unhappy all month about the way the disagreement between you and Drmies about the User000name block played out, or rather didn't play out as the conversation moved on. When I read the AN thread between the two of you, my impression was that Drmies decided to use a standard block rationale, rather than give the deeply problematic editor more attention; and he just chose the closest one he could locate on the menu. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:29, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

can't we all just...get along? Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 22:49, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

I've been saying since the dawn of time that New Page Patrol causes more problems than it solves, as it's populated by MMORPG types who see it as a point of principle to tag things for deletion within seconds of creation. Sure, this is perfectly acceptable for attack pages and obviously unsalvageable spam, but Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as importance or significance not asserted is usually full to the brim of pages on people and companies which are almost certainly significant in Misplaced Pages's terms, but get deleted before anyone has the chance to flesh them out—and then people complain that Misplaced Pages's coverage of current businesses is poor! A lot of the problem is a single overly-persistent regular who has extremely poor judgement but considers himself untouchable; I'd estimate that at least 50% of the deletion requests I decline were tagged by him.

He just chose the closest one he could locate on the menu doesn't wash; he specifically gave "User is not here to edit Misplaced Pages" as his blocking rationale in the ANI discussion. While the individual problems listed under WP:NOTHERE can on occasion be rationales for blocking, the relevant one in this case, "Users who, based on substantial Misplaced Pages-related evidence, seem to want editing rights only to legitimize a soapbox or other personal stance", doesn't apply since aside from his userpage and (arguably) a single edit to Kike none of his other activity appeared related to any agenda. (A user may have extreme or even criminal views or lifestyle in some areas, or be repugnant to other users, and yet be here to "build an encyclopedia", to quote verbatim from WP:NOTHERE; I'm aware of at least one outright Nazi who's among Misplaced Pages's most active editors.) Don't get me wrong, User000name appeared to be an utterly charmless character, but indefblocks on the grounds of an admin personally disliking an editor can end in a lot of unnecessary hassle (I'm sure I don't need to give examples), particularly when they come from arbs and are thus effectively unappealable. ‑ Iridescent 23:07, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

• I am mobile so I can't indent nicely. I don't mind anyone disagreeing with me. I do mind a charge of dishonesty or favoritism (you just repeated it), so yeah, we're going elsewhere for Hanukkah. My block was obviously not an ArbCom block and if you think that I somehow got the Cloak of Untouchability when I got on that mailing list you're wrong. Sorry for butting in. Drmies (talk) 21:56, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

A very fast note while gobbling breakfast, because I don't think I'll be able to get online from work today. Someone else has now started this discussion: Misplaced Pages:Village pump (policy)#Notability guidelines and policy for eSports; I was pinged, which was very kind, passing along notification. According to Misplaced Pages Review, this link says that the article they were writing in realtime for the podcast got deleted; I can't verify because I never did replace the dead speakers on this computer. Regarding the case study, I reminded myself that there's also a response from the organizer of the series of meetups to someone else making the point that new editors at these editathons need to be told about our requirements, at Misplaced Pages talk:Meetup/Regina/ArtAndFeminism 2016/University of Regina, and at least two relevant sections at Misplaced Pages talk:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism. I've been trying very hard not to name and shame—Kobnach just told me politely that the piece seems wishy-washy—but I will say that I'm very disturbed by some stuff there. (There were also apparently issues of plagiarism with some articles, as there often are with new editors.) @Newyorkbrad: thanks for the kind offer; unfortunately without the admin glasses I generally don't know there is deleted history, and when I do thanks to there being a notice about deletion, I can't evaluate it, so that's that I'm afraid; I have to leave that stuff to those of you who do have them. And now I have to dash, sorry. Yngvadottir (talk) 04:47, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Break: editathons, New Page Patrol, and userpages

Don't believe everything you read on Misplaced Pages Review; the article in question was Frog Legs Rag, and while it was indeed tagged for deletion within 30 seconds of its creation it was never actually deleted In fact, WR is right and I'm wrong; it was indeed deleted, by the admin who's probably the single worst offender for bulk-deleting-without-bothering-to-check, as part of this bulk deletion. Although it survived deletion I'm not sure it's a great advert for the Misplaced Pages model, given that it took 100+ edits by some of Misplaced Pages's most experienced editors working flat-out over a three-day period (plus additional edits to upload the sheet music to Wikisource, the cover art to Commons, and performing, recording and uploading a recording of the music in question) to create a 317-word stub which averages four page views per day (most of which will be search engine crawlers) and hasn't had a non-trivial edit made to it for five years.

I've never been entirely convinced of the utility of editathons. I completely understand the principle, but I'm not convinced they really serve their stated purpose. None of the people who sign up for the day ever seem to stick around afterwards; if we want a mechanism for raising awareness of "anyone can edit", for recruiting new editors and for getting new editors up Misplaced Pages's initially-steep learning curve, I personally think it would be a more productive use of resources to concentrate on formal "this is how you do a, this is how you do b, this is how you do c, don't do d or e and here's why" lessons and getting them publicly disseminated. The existing approach of encouraging editors who don't really understand Misplaced Pages policies and practices to either edit existing articles and annoy the people who are trying to keep said articles in decent shape, or creating new articles without understanding what Misplaced Pages's looking for thus demoralising the new editors when their efforts are deleted, doesn't seem to be particularly productive. Someone will no doubt pop up with a counter-example, but I can't think of a single editor recruited during an editathon who stuck around for more than a few days afterwards. ‑ Iridescent 09:41, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

There is currently a CSD:A7 issue at ANI. Article inappropriately tagged (should be PROD or AFD as it does assert significance) - article creator removed tag and edit warred with tagger claiming it was vandalism. I see a lot of these (inappropriate tags), but what worries me is since it seems to be a widespread misunderstanding, how many are actually Speedy-del without anyone realising it was incorrectly tagged? Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:47, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Lots. If it's incorrectly tagged but has no chance of surviving AFD, I'll IAR and delete them anyway, but at least I always look; there are plenty of admins who just run a bulk delete script over the categories. If you want to run a breaching experiment, find something obviously notable and put a backdated PROD template on it so it immediately goes into CAT:EX, with a completely nonsensical rationale, and see if it gets deleted. ‑ Iridescent 12:08, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

(Back from work, still awake, trying to prioritize.) That's quite a case study in itself about the rag article, and I had no idea there even were admins who bulk deleted speedy categories like that. That's clearly an unusual example, but what a collaborative effort.

I have to share one sequence of edits from the meetup project talk page: ; ; . I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I'm deeply cynical about editathons, and the one acquaintance who went to one reported something worse than I'd imagined: that it was almost entirely a lecture about the gender gap from the angle of the WMF's theory of the natural lifestyle of the editor, i.e., hope that the gap can be fixed when the long-standing editors have shuffled off. And that even less editing got done than I'd imagined. But editors I respect a lot are involved in them, not just WMF hacks. Maybe it's my teaching reflexes, but it seems so obvious to me that the organizers should help the new editors to succeed in adding content, and that means explaining things, and either preparing a list of sources in advance or being ready to spring in and add some; and that it's a crying waste of people who turn up because they're interested in contributing to the project; it's cruel; it wastes potentially useful material (crowdsourcing is our strength, not an awkward messiness to be circumvented by only permitting new articles from people we know, on subjects we know)—and it's a stupid waste to hold these things in libraries and museums and not have the articles make use of the sources available there. Is everyone now thinking of a library as a place with Wifi and a meeting room, even people who organize and run encyclopedia editathons? You know, I'm almost angry enough to run an unsanctioned editathon and show them how. I'd have to wear a bag over my head or something because people upload pics of everything all over the Internet, and I'd have to take time off, and I haven't yet thought of a good location, but yeesh.

New Page Patrol is a knotty problem. The rolling list of new pages is awe-inspiring, and will always include an utterly unpredictable mix of:

• erudite topics incomprehensible to non-specialists
• perfectly reasonable article starts on a topic the particular patroller knows nothing whatsoever about
• mass creations where all that shows in the new pages feed is the top of the infobox and there could be anything inside
• utter silliness
• ads
• things where there will be disagreement as to notability
• woeful fragments from those who hit "save" when they have little more than a title—some of whom have very bad internet connections
• appalling English (problem now officially made 10 times worse by WMF "content translation" tool, which evinces deep contempt for what we do; but it would be a problem even without the WMF, and of course a small minority of articles are created here not in English at all)
• articles requiring emergency deletion for good reasons—I had no idea how many of these there are until I became an admin and took a good look.

—I've said before that I was shocked and saddened by the breaching experiment that drove off the experienced NPP. I don't like the shooting gallery stuff either, but the encyclopedia does need a watch kept for the bad stuff. Also if, as I contend, we are now attracting a lot of editors who are not very familiar with encyclopedias in general, we shouldn't be surprised we also get editors who are unclear on the purpose of NPP. I recently had a new article of mine tagged as "insufficient footnotes", which is pretty much the opposite of what I would have expected. The tagger was a new patroller who, from the conversation I had with them on their talk page, hadn't realized it's the yellow-highlighted articles that should be the highest priority on patrol, not the unmarked ones created by editors with the autopatrolled right, and appeared to think it was a comment field—tag all the new articles with the most appropriate tag. They hadn't fully realized the tags implied criticism.

I have one suggested solution. Refocus on why we're here: to create an encyclopedia. A new article is a potentially useful gift. We are headed down the path towards what they do over at de.wikipedia, where their pages on what you should put in a new article include the admonition to think long and hard about how much of other editors' time you will be using up on the evaluation of any new article you are thinking of writing. I did it once and it was a grim experience, not 100% because of my German. We're also collectively giving a lot of mixed messages about what we're about, from the dangerous myth (again, WMF-promoted) that just about all the important stuff has been written about, through the obsession about minutiae (MOS, citation formatting, avoidance of red links(!); those appear from the outside to be the main concerns in many GA and FA reviews, which is horrifying), to the tectonic battles about what topics are (especially) worthy, including the tunnel vision about women's biographies. What should matter is writing and improving writing. That's the only thread of coherence around here, after all.

And then we can have the conversation about varying views of notability. It's overdue, because of course hundreds of thousands of people from all over the globe, with massively varying backgrounds, levels of education, and life goals are going to disagree about what should be in an almost infinitely expandable reference work. Unconscious or otherwise entrenched bias is actually a big concern of mine. It's just that absent the context of us all working together to write an encyclopedia, it's just politics and encounter groups, and that is the rest of the Internet.

Didn't there use to be an entry at WP:NOT about "not an experiment in creating a eutopia"?

And that brings me to avowedly Nazi editors, and you and Drmies (whom I greatly respect and have bothered with several e-mails, though I'm afraid he's pissed off at me right now). There are a lot of opinions I disapprove of; but I try to be brave enough to defend people's right to have them. If we want to be the encyclopedia anyone can edit—and I believe quite strongly in that, maybe except for illiterates and the dangerously insane—we need to be inclusive of an unimaginable range of opinions, just as we need to try very hard to include people of all social classes, and the WMF should be testing for accessibility to the handicapped as a matter of course. What matters is their editing. Also, there's the big consideration that people can change. Many people go through several political positions and several religions in a lifetime. In some cases in a year or two. I probably agree with Jimbo Wales about fewer things than I have fingers. But I think he was right to crack down on userboxen and decree that they should take the form "This editor is a — or is interested in — ". It's divisive to have editors proclaiming their affiliations and waving their banners. (It can also have a chilling effect on other editors, as obvious in this case and that may be what Drmies meant If we go back to what I think is actually policy imposed by Jimbo at the time, we'll hurt sweet people like Hafspajen a bit, but I think they'll understand. And we'll be able to focus on editing. Yngvadottir (talk) 19:22, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure anyone does still bulk-delete pages—remember I was gone for five years, a lot has changed in that time, and what is and isn't considered acceptable conduct from admins is certainly included in those changes.

Regarding editathons being almost entirely a lecture about the gender gap from the angle of the WMF's theory of the natural lifestyle of the editor, this is WMF policy, and it's actually the Andy Mabbetts of the world who still think the purpose of Misplaced Pages training is to teach people how to edit Misplaced Pages rather than to recruit an online army to right the world's wrongs who are now the voices in the wilderness. You can get your own WMF-approved Systemic Bias Kit here, should you so desire.

New Page Patrol in my opinion has never recovered from the WP:NEWT campaign of organised harassment. (Yes, that's what it was; "breaching experiment" gives too much credit. They intentionally tried to create articles which didn't technically meet deletion criteria and hid the sources within wiki-markup or in foreign-language text to make it impossible for any reasonable reader to find them without unreasonable effort, and then publicly humiliated whoever happened to fall for it; as far as I'm concerned every person involved should have been indefblocked as trolls.) It's suffering particularly badly as one of its most active participants has severe competence issues, which is rubbing off onto enthusiastic newcomers who see him in action and have no reason not to assume that plastering maintenance tags over anything you haven't heard of isn't what's being asked of them.

Regarding new pages, what would probably be the sensible course of action in an era where the number of articles keeps rising but the number of patrollers keeps falling, is to strip regular editors of the ability to create pages, with all new pages automatically created into a noindexed draftspace and a restricted group of people with at least a vague degree of clue (1000 edits/90 days?) having to manually approve them and move them into article space. Yes, it would be Sangerification and the WMF would probably block it as a matter of principle, but the crapflood is reaching the point where the nature of the disease requires so sharp a remedy.

You'd be surprised just how many reviewers do think GA/FA reviewing is purely a matter of MOS compliance, and will overlook any issues with the actual quality. Not wanting to name-and-shame, but consider this GA review from only a week ago as a particularly egregious example. I see someone has now taken that one to GAR, at least.

The old "multiple independent reliable sources" criterion may be a poor one for notability, but it's the best we've got. It's very hard to predict what readers actually want to read, rather than what we think they ought to be reading; as I've mentioned before, of everything I've written Tarrare consistently gets the most pageviews, and it's hard to even imagine a topic more obscure. Even monumentally dull articles like Quainton Road railway station consistently get around 30 readers per day—coincidentally, almost exactly the same pageview level as Cats That Look Like Hitler, the starting of which is surely my finest accomplishment. If you want a rather snarky aside, 30 pageviews a day is exactly 30 time as many as the first example I picked at random from Keilana's much-publicised drive to create the articles she thinks editors ought to be writing rather than the ones they actually write. Looking at other examples from that list, it doesn't seem like I've inadvertently cherry-picked a particularly low-traffic one, either.

If I had my way userpages would be deprecated altogether, or reduced to a minimal "My name is xxxx, I live in yyyy, I am interested in zzzz"; I don't really see why anyone should have a userpage longer than User:Newyorkbrad as an upper limit. I have absolutely no issue with someone declaring themselves a racist, a Stalinist, an ISIS-sympathiser etc on their userpage provided they do so neutrally—as long as they're not proselytising I view it as commendable honesty that they're noting the fields in which they won't have a neutral point of view. That's not the case here though; this userpage was undoubtedly unacceptable and I've no issue at all with it being deleted, but the correct response to an otherwise-reasonable editor whose userpage you consider unacceptable is to ask them if they're willing to blank it and if they decline to take the userpage to MFD, not to haul the editor to ANI, round up an angry mob of the usual suspects who just like saying support block as it makes them feel important, and then enact an out-of-process block on the editor in question. (The editor in question has now rendered the question moot by using the Deplorable Word in his block appeal, but the underlying principle stands.) ‑ Iridescent 20:35, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Well of course I have an extremely long user page :-) I think I still disagree with you regarding acceptable user page statements: it can very easily have a chilling effect or, conversely, produce an invidious assumption of bias, and it's very important to me that there be no pressure on editors to reveal identifying information. Plus, just as I like user names (the IP editor last known to me as 75 proposed assigning them on registration and was surprised by my shocked reaction), I like seeing people's creative formatting of their user pages, with pictures and so on. I believe that degree of acceptance of the conventions of what's now called "social media" puts us at ease and helps us remember folks' handles. If I were Editor:XA409 I'd have difficulty remembering my own nick and would give up on remembering others', and I'd feel less welcome partly because people would have less of an opportunity to form a mental picture of me as an individual. I suspect folks also find it easier to remember who I am because they can associate me with that bizarre user page, although I haven't got the reaction I expected from adding a photo of myself '-) I was creeped out by "Wikilove" initially, but when I started receiving such gifts I rapidly changed my mind. And with that I must hit the sack. Apologies for long-windedness. And P.S.: Please, please don't give me a still lower opinion of the WMF. I keep trying to remember they mean well. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:58, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Although, I can flip that around and say that users' increasing familiarity with social media has acculturated them to an environment of ultra-minimal user customisation (the closest thing to a "userpage" you'll get on Twitter, Facebook etc or on a phpBB forum is the ability to choose a background image and a profile photo, and maybe a couple of very basic facts about yourself), and that Misplaced Pages's fancy userpages are a throwback to Misplaced Pages's creation during the era of Myspace, Bebo and LiveJournal and actually makes the site look something of an outdated relic. (See also this thread for more of my views on unnecessary clutter.) Remember, an ever-increasing number of readers and editors are using the mobile site (particularly since the software is too stupid to understand the concept of "screen size" and assumes everything running iOS or Android is a phone, so even if someone's editing on a 13-inch iPad Pro with a larger screen than many laptops, it'll still serve up the mobile site), and all those userpages people spend so much time carefully laying out and formatting are unreadable crap in mobile view. I don't really object to WikiLove, which is just a blinged-up version of barnstars; compared to some of the WMF's batty "editor engagement" schemes like MoodBar, AFT or whatever the hell this is, it's benign and easily ignored by those who don't care to get involved (and don't get me started on the "thank" button). ‑ Iridescent 22:26, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
So reassuring to hear that the WMF plans to be "smart but human". I can sleep safely in my bed, knowing that Jimmy Wales is keeping Misplaced Pages free from both superintelligent robots and talking dogs.

Sidetrack: pageviews and biscuits

Okay - that page analysis is scary. That's much worse than Miss Meyers, who is the perennial example of a "too short FA". As for userpages - mine is mainly a "what I should be working on" or "what I've worked on" - with only a bit of editorializing on non-Misplaced Pages subjects. Ealdgyth - Talk 22:18, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

I think my personal least read is Glass Age Development Committee, which as far as I can tell has only ever once had views in double figures. I've always felt that there's probably a genuinely interesting story to be written there, if only I (or someone) could be bothered to actually dig it out. ‑ Iridescent 22:26, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Dramatist Studio of Sweden. There may be one that's even less popular. Increasingly, my articles don't even get their talk pages created. However, at least they rarely get AfD'd, especially since my AfD success percentage is way below what's required at RfA these days. On the other hand, I got to create Autocunnilingus and Techno Viking (for which there was at least one vid on YouTube about how awful it was Misplaced Pages didn't have an article). So it evens out. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:08, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

In early 2008 comments made by singer and actress Madonna brought the link between biscuits and sexual activity into question, in which she blamed then-husband Guy Ritchie's lack of interest in sex on overconsumption of biscuits.

I'm still smarting over Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Biscuits and human sexuality (if you'll forgive a moment of WP:ABF, one of the most blatant "I don't care what the consensus is, I don't like it" closes in Wiki-history). Even the obscurest articles can take off if something happens to give them critical mass—Broadwater Farm was for years an article so obscure that Misplaced Pages Review used it as one of their go-to examples of a pointless Misplaced Pages page, until it suddenly found itself the focus of the world's media four years after I wrote it. Actually, Ordish-Lefeuvre system beats Glass Age for lack of readers. (Astoundingly, more than 20 people per day manage to end up at Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed somehow.) ‑ Iridescent 16:25, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Sporfle. (Geographic bias! If it had been cookies it would have been kept!) Yngvadottir (talk) 17:17, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Biscuit≠cookie; biscuits can be sweet or savoury, cookies are always sweet. If it had been kept it would have been expanded with a long aside about the curious history of the Graham cracker (lest we forget, originally invented as a medication to suppress the desire to masturbate), so it needed the broader term. Of course, this does provide me with a pretext to haul the finest image in the whole of Commons's fine collection out of retirement. ‑ Iridescent 17:28, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Ah, I see; my food knowledge is not very extensive. That's a very special image, but I can't help regretting the waste of all those lovely biccies, especially the bourbons. Yngvadottir (talk) 04:37, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

What I find hilarious is that at least two Wikipedias are using it as a straightforward illustration on their Oral sex page.

That uploader has a much more interesting upload history than the usual "here are 200 photos of my garden shed" Commons contributor. The images all look like photographs at first glance, but when you zoom in they're all made of something peculiar.

At some point I'm going to translate es:Mondongo (artistas) just to give a pretext to get one of these onto the Main Page. Plasticene Red Riding Hood is particularly disturbing if you click onto her face in full resolution. ‑ Iridescent 16:08, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

<g> I found enough sources! Yngvadottir (talk) 18:48, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

The biscuit one works pretty much perfectly at mainpage size (see right); there's enough detail to see that something is going on and that it's not a straightforward photo, but not enough detail actually to make out the biscuits. I'd confidently predict that at either DYK or TFA it would make the all-time top ten for pageviews. If nothing else, it would be worth it for the comedy value of the angsty shouting match between the Gormanistas and the WP:NOTCENSORED True Believers. ‑ Iridescent 15:50, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Doitdoitdoitdoit!

Heh. I saw your ping the other day, way up at the top of this thread, but have fallen behind on WP. Now I finally start catching up and find that biscuit picture again. As a thread on this talkpage gets longer, the probability of seeing that image approaches 1... ;) Opabinia regalis (talk) 18:09, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Since at virtually any point in the last two years there's been at least one work of 19th-century pornography under discussion on this page at any given time, nobody can really claim to be horrified at seeing Naughty Bits here.

I did a bit of digging but can't find anything that will push Mondongo over en-wiki's notability bar, but my Spanish is not great. I'll keep digging.

There's obviously something in the air in Buenos Aires when it comes to images. To go back to one of my other regular hobby-horses of bizarre grave markers, my all-time champion for the coveted "what the fuck was the funeral director thinking?" award is Argentinian, and it's a matter of great sorrow that the works of Xul Solar are all still in copyright (Google them). ‑ Iridescent 18:20, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I really think I have enough at this point, including 2 major Spanish-language newspaper articles (from different years) and an AP article. Here's a useful summary of the purposes of the Seria Negra, which would enable proposing that as the DYK image:

En la serie Negra optaron por bajar modelos de Internet y reproducirlos con galletitas vulgares, que en sus tonalidades van del beige al chocolate, que no sólo apelan al consumo sino también a la monocromía, a lo vacuo, al porno del todo por dos pesos, a la deserotización, a lo mecánico y rutinario. A la aldea global masificada en el sexo virtual.

However, annoyingly, I can't substantiate their having works in the permanent collections at the Tate Modern and MOMA, only participation in exhibitions. Anyway, I have a long bookmarked list now.Yngvadottir (talk) 20:31, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I can find out for Tate Modern. (I'd be surprised if they didn't, given that any artist from the last 50 years whose work is relatively cheap is likely to be represented in either Tate Modern or Tate Liverpool. The combination of Blair pissing money into it when it was being built, and Cameron slashing their budget to the bone, means Tate Modern and Liverpool have a vast amount of space and not a great deal to put in it other than the relatively small collection they inherited from the old Tate Gallery, and will consequently buy any old tat provided it's cheap.) ‑ Iridescent 20:40, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Good—I thought as much but couldn't find them listed. Mondongo (collective) is started, but has umpteen things that need to be added, including the English source that is half the footnotes in the Spanish article. And the Commons category needs creating before it can be added to both. However, I must now go to bed. Yngvadottir (talk) 06:43, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Commons:Category:Mondongo (collective) created—I've created it under that clunky name despite Category:Mondongo being a redlink since Commons has quite a few pictures of the soup which will obviously be the primary usage if anyone creates a separate category for them. Maybe it ought really to be at Category:Mondongo (grupo de artistas), but if es-wiki can't be bothered to create a category themselves I don't see why we should pander to them. (I note in passing that some po-faced Commons admin who apparently doesn't understand the concept of "list artworks under their titles" has moved File:Blonde teenie sucking.jpg to File:Cookies and biscuits are used to make this sexually graphic image.jpg— maybe I should move File:The Scream.jpg to File:Pastels overlaid with oil paint are used to make this image of three men on a bridge, one of whom appears distressed.jpg.) ‑ Iridescent 08:08, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I think I'm done. What's missing is the claim about the permanent collection. You may want to swap in Little Red Riding Hood as a replacement for Fogwell as lead image or make more sweeping changes. Taringa! unfortunately is a social media platform, so I tried to minimize my use of that fine source (and did not add the years of birth of the 3 founders from it). It's an orphan, but I imagine we have an article on food art or épater les bourgeois where it can be linked. There are only 2 red links, a low number for stuff I do. If you want to nominate it for DYK, feel free, but I don't participate there any more so I will pretend not to notice. I added the Commons category to the Spanish article, so maybe somebody over there will wake up and add a pic; for some reason the only one from the set that I see being used there is the Fogwell portrait at es:Quilmes. Oh, and pinging Xanthomelanoussprog, who may want to get in on this. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:10, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

• Ping response. It was Eid al-Fitr today; the streets were full of Muslims in holiday mood, and after 7 years the Chilcot Report is published. Hmm… lXanthomelanoussprog (talk) 21:22, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I bought a Japanese cloisonné vase the other day, thinking it was Chinese. Anyway, it has mica flakes incorporated in the enamel- which makes me think that the Mondongo portraits of Juan Carlos et al is glass painted with lacquer and not mica-pigmented. Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 22:17, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I'll see what I can do if I can find anything else to add, although looks like an excellent job so far. I may not get round to it for a couple of days as my availability will be patchy. ‑ Iridescent 11:08, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

DYK

Now at DYK, if anyone wants to nip over and review it. If you've never done one before, reviewing is very easy. If anyone can suggest a better hook, do feel free—I've unsurprisingly gone with That Image, as I think I know Misplaced Pages's core readership (teenage boys, basement-dwelling nerds, and people who prowl the internet looking for a pretext to feel outraged) well enough to know which of the five options is likely to generate the most interest. The article is good enough even in this unfinished state that I suspect at least some of the people who only visit it in the hope of seeing boobies will stick around to find out more about modern Latin American art. (Whether this happens is measurable; see if pages like Centro Cultural Recoleta have a detectable rise in views on the day.) ‑ Iridescent 17:24, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Promoted, and in the queue to go up in 2.5 hours, last I looked; without the image, which is a pity but can't be helped. However, I'm mystified as to why they used ALT1. Yngvadottir (talk) 11:35, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Comments at CheckingFax RfA

It seems that "I won't be commenting further" is too difficult to follow. If you really want to continue down this rabbit-hole, you might want to take this thread from two months ago, nominating an obvious copyright violation at GA last week, or the false claim in the nomination statement to have "taken an article to FA" (every edit to the article in question) as further jumping-off points. If you feel the need to discuss it further, there are 62,249,865 places other than my talk page on which to do so. I note in passing that if my oppose and every oppose citing me had switched to support, the RFA would be at 11 supports vs 18 opposes, and would still have tanked. ‑ Iridescent 17:35, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I was rather disappointed in your oppose comment here. It would have been helpful if your comment had actually explained what had happened rather than an editorialization with no summary of the facts. As far as I can tell, the question at at the Carey Grant page had to do with access dates for books in a Google Books citation templates, and whether or not to use a certain type of quotation template. As far as the ANI dispute, it seems to center around a citation template which was changed to "Last name, firstname; Lastname, firstname" from "Lastname, firstname and Lastname, firstname". It seems to me that this was blown way out of proportion. Am I missing something? II | (t - c) 06:24, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The whole point of an RFA comment, on either side of the line, is "editorialization", since one is expressing one's personal opinion, not cited facts. I included links to both Talk:Cary Grant and the ANI thread precisely so people could make up their own minds; those who disagree are, I presume, perfectly capable of typing "Support, I do not agree with the concerns raised".

It's precisely because the issues were trivial that they're problematic; someone standing up for deeply held principles is understandable, and won't necessarily be grounds for opposing provided the candidate indicates that they're aware of the issues about which they hold strong views and knows when to step back. On the other hand, someone with a very recent history of escalation and heel-digging over petty disputes (and petty disputes in which their position is squarely against Misplaced Pages policy—regardless of how much I personally dislike it, WP:CITEVAR is very well established) is problematic. I'd recommend reading this thread to get more of the background, as it gives a good taste of the "but I like it better my way!" mentality at play here. There's also the question of omission; that this set of disputes are so recent he can't have forgotten them, so their not being mentioned either implies that he doesn't consider them important, or that he's intentionally hoping to hide them. (I'd personally consider filing an RFA with a contentious ANI thread in the very recent past as prima facie evidence of poor judgement, regardless of who was in the right.)

Given that the RFA in question is now closed, I see no reason to put the boot in to someone who's already on the floor—RFanything is an unpleasant experience at the best of times, particularly when you get more opposition than you expected—so won't be commenting further. ‑ Iridescent 08:09, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

You are of course free to editorialize - I'm not saying don't provide your opinion - but I am free to be disappointed at those who editorialize without providing a minimum set of facts upfront to place that editorialization in context. Particularly when you're the first !vote which puts you into a position of influence. You did a bit better job here, but I still don't think the picture is entirely clear. CheckingFax owned up to making some mistakes in

User:ImperfectlyInformed, that's how RFA works, it's not your call on what people give as the reason for opposing. The fact that so many opposes were given and it swiftly aborted tells me that there was probably a good reason behind why so many people opposed.♦ Dr. Blofeld 08:40, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Dr. Blofeld (talk · contribs), on Misplaced Pages we generally like to make judgments based on substance rather than surface level metrics such as number of !votes, whether we're in AfD or RfA. So I hope you take a look and make a judgment on your own rather than taking the word of people, many of whom cited Iridiscent's comments (or the one person who erroneously cited Newyorkbrad, who didn't even !vote). Misplaced Pages is frequently criticized for its hostile environment. It's up to all of us to figure out how to make the Misplaced Pages community sustainable. One of the things about User:CheckingFax is that he clearly makes an effort to be welcoming and help out new (and existing) users, and he doesn't lose his cool even if he doesn't always communicate perfectly. II | (t - c) 17:12, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Nemessis

Hello,

Previously you deleted the Nemessis page under A7. It appears the user recreated it with the same content? I retagged this for speedy deletion, please let me know if this does not qualify or if I should use a different process this time around? Dane2007 (talk) 02:17, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

WP:G4 only applies to pages that were deleted "via its most recent deletion discussion", and not to speedy-deletions, so just consider its recreation as an unorthodox way of requesting WP:REFUND. I've undeleted the history of the original, to ensure the existing article is correctly attributed in the unlikely event that it's kept. ‑ Iridescent 15:01, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you!! I appreciate the additional information :).Dane2007 (talk) 19:48, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Non free image question

Dear Misplaced Pages administrator Iridescent, A while ago I put a logo on the my pet monster cartoon article from this website http://www.toonarific.com/show_pics.php?show_id=2533, and it is also the opening scene. Every TV show article on Misplaced Pages has the opening scene in the info box so this one should be added too. Also the image is not copyrighted. Can I put the image back up?— Preceding unsigned comment added by Davidgoodheart (talk • contribs)

Davidgoodheart, of course the image is copyrighted; see the big notice at the bottom of the page you link that says "Copyright 1998 Toonarific Cartoons"?

We can only accept copyrighted content under very limited circumstances; see Misplaced Pages:Non-free content criteria#Policy for the details. Basically, you need to explain where you got it, why it's necessary that we include it, and where and how you intend to use it. The best place to ask would probably be Misplaced Pages:Teahouse/Questions; I have no involvement with television articles. ‑ Iridescent 19:47, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Why do you think I am removing !votes?

I am moving long discussions to the talk page. I don't understand.—_Chat:Online 14:20, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Kraftlos and MSJapan's votes were caught up accidentally. HighInBC 14:21, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You do realise this is a wiki and everyone can see you removing the votes, right? Just count the totals before and after your edit. ‑ Iridescent 14:25, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Indeed. I didn't realize I moved them with the discussion until it was pointed out to me. Sorry.—_Chat:Online 14:27, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

And I wasn't counting the totals.

What Xeno said here. Even disregarding removing the oppose votes, you're not being helpful, you're being disruptive; there's a difference between clerking inappropriate comments and blanket censorship of dissenting opinions, and you're squarely on the wrong side of it (and I say that as someone in the support column). Unless and until RFA becomes like an Arbcom election with just "yes" or "no", people have a right to make reasonable responses about any comment they deem fit. ‑ Iridescent 14:31, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

My apologies. I was simply moving the discussions which seemed to have been getting long to the talk page. It wasn't my intention to be disruptive.—_Chat:Online 14:33, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Henley & Partners page deletion

Hi, you deleted my page "Henley & Partners" on 23 June for unambiguous advertising. I would really like to have another go at editing the content so that it no longer reads like an advertisement. Is there anyway that you might restore the content to my talk page so that I can keep working on it? I would also apreciate any feedback and tips on how to make the content read better.

Thank you

Mara.ispas (talk) 12:52, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages isn't an advertising portal. A Misplaced Pages article needs to demonstrate that multiple, independent, non-trivial reliable sources consider the topic significant, and to give a neutral summary of the topic. Other than a short "History" section, the article I deleted consisted of a lengthy and irrelevant list of publications, some puffery about a non-notable award, more puffery about "social responsibility", and a note about how great the current Chairman is. If you want, I can undelete the page to your userspace so you can work on it, but I'll warn you it will need a complete root-and-branch rebuilding to be appropriate for Misplaced Pages. ‑ Iridescent 13:01, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback, I will definitely spend more time on it before I attempt to move it into the live space again. Please may you go ahead and un-delete the page to my userspace.

Mara.ispas (talk) 13:57, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Restored to User:Mara.ispas/Henley & Partners. ‑ Iridescent 14:49, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you! I have worked on it some more, and made quite a few changes as per your feedback. I would really appreciate it if you would be able to take a look and see if I am on the right track, and which areas still need improving on?

Mara.ispas (talk) 07:34, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

That's looking a lot better, and is probably ready to be moved back into article space. One thing which does strike me is the lack of negative commentary; has this company genuinely never received any criticism from politicians or the media? ‑ Iridescent 07:50, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you! I have now added a "Criticism" section in the article — do you think this would be suitable? Mara.ispas (talk) 12:11, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Decline of CSD for Subhan Sahib

Hi, I noticed that you declined the CSD for Subhan Sahib with the reason being 'Seriously? How do you get "no assertion of notability" from this?'. I was wondering, why? Did you not notice that virtually the entire article is a copy and paste from Asaf Ali, an entirely different person. Only the first line and infobox actually relate to Subhan Sahib, and certainly do not indicate any notability. The article was also previously deleted for being a copy and paste. May I suggest that you reconsider your decline and instead delete the article. Thank-you David.moreno72 (talk) 06:02, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

It doesn't matter; The criterion does not apply to any article that makes any credible claim of significance or importance even if the claim is not supported by a reliable source or does not qualify on Misplaced Pages's notability guidelines, and Indian independence activist, Freedom fighter, Bus Owner, Agency for various Products, Owner of Bharatha Matha Rice Mill is undoubtedly a claim of significance. WP:CSD#A7 is intentionally very specific and extremely inflexible, and is intended as a mechanism to allow us to delete articles by people writing about their friends and family, not as a means for getting rid of poorly-written or inaccurate content; this is clearly someone trying to create a new article by copying the format of an existing article, rather than an attempt at deception.

Misplaced Pages's bureaucracy may be frustrating, but it exists for a reason—slapping speedy-deletion tags on new material contributed in good faith just because the creator is new to Misplaced Pages and doesn't yet understand the rules is a hostile act which just drives away potential contributors. Remove whatever material is inappropriate from the article and (if necessary) nominate what's left for deletion via WP:PROD or WP:AFD as appropriate. ‑ Iridescent 06:20, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments, it's always good to get feedback from highly experienced administrators. I have done what you suggested and removed the inappropriate material and added a WP:PROD tag. Again, thanks for your comments. Cheers David.moreno72 (talk) 06:46, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

I've restored the legitimate content you've removed, and speedy-declined your WP:BLPPROD; given that the man died in 1987, this is obviously not a BLP. ‑ Iridescent 06:58, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Sitush, you know more about this kind of thing than me; do you think this one is salvageable? ‑ Iridescent 06:59, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Since Sitush is only editing sporadically I'll chime in. I doubt this is salvageable, there are many many people who were peripherally involved and arrested during the Quit India movement, most of whom don't have anything written about them (including a few on my family tree) except in the records of the local police station that made the arrests. In this case, the grandson of the subject seems to be keen on getting his name on blogs and records and that's about all the evidence there is to it. As for the rice mill, any rice or flour trader is known as a rice mill in Tamil Nadu and these are small mom and pop shops, not a mill of the General Mills kind. The only stuff I could find in Tamil is related to another Subhan Sahib who happens to be a son of Tipu Sultan. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 08:03, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

I agree about the rice mill (and I strongly suspect the "bus company" translates as "owned a battered van which ferried people to and from the railway station"). I'll give it a few days to see if anyone can add to it—the online documentation of Quit India is not great (and spread across a dozen languages), and it's perfectly possible that someone will dig up an old press cutting regarding his having done something particularly noteworthy. ‑ Iridescent 08:19, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

OK, if it were going to be improved the improvement would at least have started by now. Deleted. ‑ Iridescent 08:54, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Institute of Food Research

Hello Iridescent,

The page titled Institute of Food Research was deleted a few weeks ago citing G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion. Whilst the language may have been promotional, I think that there should be an opportunity to address this as I believe the Institute of Food Research meets the definition of notability as there are many independent reliable sources from which a more neutral article could be produced. Thank you — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hhu362n (talk • contribs) 12:29, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

The topic is undoubtedly notable, but the page I deleted was to all extents and purposes a press release (right down to describing the subject as "we"), and I'm not going to restore it (feel free to try your arm at WP:REFUND if you disagree). If you can write a neutral article on the topic based on reliable sources, feel free. ‑ Iridescent 14:34, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

help desk

Your comment makes no sense in the context of that thread. If one can construe that thread as somehow having something to do with you then they could construe it as having something to do with absolutely anything at all...please go read the thread carefully and reexamine your assertion about it (as you were not assuming good faith and just trying to find some cover for criticizing me in an irrelevant way)..68.48.241.158 (talk) 14:49, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Why yes, you're clearly here to write articles, not to argue. As you've just been told on your talkpage, if you have something useful to add to articles Misplaced Pages will welcome you, but if you just want to push a personal agenda about why you think 1⁄7 of active editors being admins is too low a ratio to anyone who'll listen, Misplaced Pages is probably not the place for you. Sure, there are people who dedicate a great deal of attention to reforming (or radically restructuring) Misplaced Pages's creaking governance structure, but they're either long-term participants in Misplaced Pages or long-term observers of Misplaced Pages, who can explain why they feel that the current system isn't working, explain how they think a proposed change would function better and how to mitigate any potential downsides to change, and (crucially) judge a conversation well enough to understand when to withdraw.

I've wasted more than enough time responding to your mixture of ill-informed conspiracy theories and bizarre proposals, and am not going to engage with you any further. If you do want to complain about how the Misplaced Pages admins were all mean to you, without stopping to consider why you get blocked so regularly, I believe that WikiProject Editor Retention and Wikipediocracy are the traditional venues. (Be aware that any attempt to complain that myself, HighInBC and The Blade of the Northern Lights are in any kind of conspiracy will likely get you laughed out of either of them.) ‑ Iridescent 16:26, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

WPO tends to have *less* patience with editors like that. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:40, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

a simple apology would have sufficed..as your comment in that thread is exactly what I describe, as any reasonable person can discover..and is again indicative of poor admin behavior that I've continuously run into...your link to fancy data about my contributions is meaningless too as I largely change articles indirectly via talk discussion in a collaborative way...but I'm fine with not directly engaging with you too...68.48.241.158 (talk) 17:50, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Userfied copy of deleted FCCLA article

Can I ask for a userfied copied of the article you deleted for FCCLA. Between FCCLA and Family, Career and Community Leaders of America, there are about 400 articles linking in, overwhelmingly from high school articles where there is a local chapter. It should be simple to expand it to meet notability standards, but it would be easier if I can have a copy of what was deleted. Per this source, the organization has 200,000 members in 6,500 chapters nationwide, and sources should be available. Alansohn (talk) 20:25, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Restored to mainspace for what that's worth—move it to userspace if you don't plan to work on it fairly soon, as there's no way it will survive another deletion request in this state. At all of two sentences long, there's not a great deal to work with. An article also existed at Family, Career and Community Leaders of America which I'm not restoring, as it was a cut-and-paste copyright violation of their website. ‑ Iridescent 16:00, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Deletion of VITA Zahnfabrik on 23 June

Hello, you deleted the page "VITA_Zahnfabrik" on 23 June for unambiguous advertising. In the meantime I have an english translation of the original german article which I published in the german wikipedia on 5 June without any negative responses. Would you please restore the old article, so that I can apply the changes?

Thank you Dinkelberger (talk) 15:02, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

userfied by me. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 15:19, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Angry mobs

And this is why any ANI thread, RFC, block review or noticeboard discussion to which the consensus isn't immediately obvious tends to fester unclosed with no admin wanting to touch it; no matter how politely the discussions of and challenges to the closure start out, it invariably descends into partisans on both sides hoping that if they fling enough shit, some of it will stick. My talkpage is not the methadone version of Misplaced Pages Review; any further posts on either of these topics will be reverted.

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The ed17

He was never an "enemy", just someone acting in flagrant disregard to the community, using the main page as a playground. And I thought that before I was told about his little Prince joke. Thanks for closing the discussion. As I said, if nothing else, it just means more scrutiny of his errant behaviour henceforth. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:11, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

I was thinking as much of your spat with NYB as with Ed himself. You do sometimes give the impression of treating minor comments with which you disagree as being worthy of full-scale handbaggings; I know WP:ERRORS and WP:ITN (and the MP in general) attract more than their fair share of self-important windbags who gravitate there because no other place on Misplaced Pages will put up with their incompetence (and I'm sure you know the two people I particularly have in mind), but I do sometimes get the feeling you've been immersed in the corrosive culture over there for so long that you assume anyone making any comment is doing so out of either malice or stupidity. ‑ Iridescent 19:18, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

No, Brad is a force unto himself, floating around making threats of this and that, and in this particular case, advocating that editors contravene a behavioural guideline, and threatening to do it himself, twice. I find it incredibly distasteful for people like him who actually make no effort to improve Misplaced Pages and simply rest on former Arbcom laurels, attempting to dictate from some kind of ivory tower. If these dictatorial individuals actually worked on making Misplaced Pages a higher quality place, I'd have time for them. As it happens, and as I object to admins purposely acting against guidelines, I won't take it lying down. There is a corrosive culture, and some of it is driven from those who believe somehow that they are super users. It ain't so. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:27, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

As Brad will probably pop up to confirm, I've regularly made much the same allegation about him in the past (IIRC the exact phrase was "self-appointed Cicero of the wiki"). My view has mellowed over the years; I do see some value in there being people with extensive interest in Misplaced Pages and its internal structure and squabbles, but who are so uninvested in the actual content that they can offer observations from positions of relative neutrality (cf Jimmy Wales, Greg Kohs, that nutty Offwiki guy a couple of years back…). I certainly don't like his habit of occasionally popping up to deliver his personal opinions as if they'd been handed to him on stone tablets and aren't open to debate, but he's hardly alone in that and he's certainly not the worst offender for it, either. ‑ Iridescent 19:37, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Don't disagree with most of what you've written, but I'm not interested in self-appointed uber-users who don't actively improve the content, just sit back and comment on it while the rest of us put in the hard work, and who somehow believe they can float in and attempt to lecture on things about which they aren't really competent to lecture. Particularly when they are substantially biased in what they do. But hey ho. Just wanted you to know that Ed wasn't the enemy, just a moderately clueless admin using the main page as a sandbox, to which I strenuously object. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:58, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

He's by no means the worst offender for a moderately clueless admin using the main page as a sandbox, given how recently this wretched episode took place. (Although, I'm not sure he realises how close he came to being desysopped for the purple thing; I've seen people indefblocked for less.) The problem with the MP, and all the elements which make it up, is that because of its high profile people tend to feel the urge to try to improve it. (If I had my way, ITN and DYK would be deprecated altogether—in terms of effort expended vs utility to readers, they must have the worst cost-benefit ratio of any page on Misplaced Pages with the possible exception of ANI.) ‑ Iridescent 20:06, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Of course, not wanting to "take it lying down" does not give TRM a license to be vehemently vitriolic, especially when he's already been admonished by Arbcom for "incivility and using inflammatory language." I'm frankly surprised that you (Iridescent) didn't call TRM out for gross incivility in your close. Ed  01:21, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I've just re-checked every single comment TRM made in that thread to see if I'd missed something, and I can't see anything that could remotely be considered "gross incivility". Neither the comment that you call out as "invective" (Once again you appear to be ignorant of guidelines, specifically in this case one which has had the precise effect the guideline intends to mitigate. The fun and games you had with ITN (purple?!) combined with a distinct lack of awareness on behavioural guidelines leads to one inevitable conculusion: You don't seem fit to be an admin I'm afraid. But that's for the next visit here I suspect.) and "a drive-by personal attack" (Unfortunately there's a level of WP:COMPETENCE to which a number of those who regularly contribute at ITN fail to meet. Some of the opinions voiced here are clear indicators of such shortcomings. It's not worth a breath discussing it with the because they can't hear you I'm afraid.) is something any neutral observer would consider "gross incivility", and I can't see any other comment from him in that thread that rises above the level of "snappy". ‑ Iridescent 08:08, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Attacking someone personally ("competence," etc) isn't a personal attack or incivil in your book? Right. Ed  15:50, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Not in these circumstances; since this thread was about a competence issue. As best I can see, there's a virtually unanimous consensus that your actions regarding ITN demonstrated a lack of competence. That isn't a personal attack. Everyone has some areas in which they're not competent, the key to getting along on Misplaced Pages is the self-awareness to know when you're out of your depth in a given area, and the willingness to listen to people when they're telling you you're doing something wrong. ‑ Iridescent 16:03, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

AN closure

Thank you for your closure of the thread regarding The ed17 at AN. The thread appears to have caused Ed to actually take some notice of the criticism he was getting, which multiple quiet words failed to do, and so from that point of view I regard it as successful. However the thread did rather degenerate into various slanging matches (if you figure out how to stop this I reckon you could make your fortune) and so I'd probably have closed it with a similar message to yours if I weren't involved in it. Thryduulf (talk) 20:45, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Hello, and welcome to AN! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. (While AN is necessary, it suffers even more than ANI from the fact that it concentrates Misplaced Pages's biggest egos into a relatively small space.).

In all seriousness, I don't think The Ed is acting out any kind of malice or even incompetence (except for the Prince thing); I get the feeling he genuinely didn't understand that ITN is intended to demonstrate that Misplaced Pages covers current events as well as hurricanes and Victorian cricketers, not as a news ticker, so he was arguing at cross-purposes to everyone else. (We really ought to rename In The News to something more accurate like "Articles on current events", since I think it confuses every single reader as well.) ‑ Iridescent 20:56, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Such a view has me wondering what prompted "... admin status isn't a licence to ignore any rules you feel are beneath you" then, as it seems to assume a solid metric ton of bad faith on my part. ;-) Ed  01:21, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Ed, even if one accepted that your motives for all the actions raised in Thryduulf's initial post were absolutely pure and that you genuinely believed that everybody correcting you was misreading Misplaced Pages's rules, and that your correction of TRM's spelling was a good-faith effort to improve the readability of the page and not an obvious attempt to needle him (neither you nor NYB corrected anyone else), there's no explanation for the purple incident other than "taking admin status as a licence to ignore the rules". ‑ Iridescent 08:22, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Note that I corrected two people's spelling there, and I don't needle people. On Prince, you should specify that in your close. That's a large tarring brush to refer to just one admin action. Ed  15:49, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Prince is one relatively minor issue, and we don't haul out the heavy artillery for a single piece of vandalism (even though an admin ought to know better). The issue is a consistent effort over time to overrule Misplaced Pages consensus despite you repeatedly being asked not to; the diffs are all at the start of the thread. ‑ Iridescent 16:04, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Any evidence that our genuine readers are confused, or is it just the editing gang, a few million versus probably a couple of hundred? Always interesting to me, particularly as an ERRORS admin too, we seldom get genuine complaints about so-called errors, most of them come from the nit-picky editor community, and most of them come from a tiny sliver who even know ERRORS exists. Is there any third-party evidence that suggests the current main page is factually inaccurate, that it regularly posts errors, that readers don't get it? A genuine question. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:12, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Implicitly yes; given the fairly regular flow of IPs asking variations of "why haven't you mentioned (current news story)?" (the reason you don't see them at WP:ERRORS is that they usually wind up at Talk:Main Page), it's obvious that at least some readers consider ITN to be a news ticker. Realistically, why wouldn't they assume it's a news ticker, since it looks like a news ticker, it's in exactly the place Yahoo, AOL, BBC and other portal-to-subsections type top-level pages keep their news ticker, it's full of what look like news headlines and it says "In The News" in big bold letters at the top? ‑ Iridescent 08:22, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I've seen this traffic, too. And it's a reasonable misunderstanding. The ITN criteria are as tangled as they are in part because actually we don't really know what the damn thing is for. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 09:14, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Indeed: direct readers to articles that have been substantially updated to reflect recent or current events of wide interest means whatever one wants it to mean. Per my comments a few threads up, I think the time has come for a radical rethink of whether the elements of the MP, and in particular ITN, are actually worth the candle. When ITN (then called "Breaking News") started in the wake of 9/11, Misplaced Pages was a brand-new site and it was understandable that we wanted to point out that we had articles on September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack, 2001 U.S. Attack on Afghanistan and 2001 anthrax attack to readers who might not know that Misplaced Pages hosts articles on current events as well as the more traditional topics.* Nowadays, everyone knows what Misplaced Pages covers and how it works, and knows perfectly well that if they want to read Misplaced Pages's 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt article they type "Turkish coup" into the search box, so the supposed purpose of ITN is pretty much redundant; however, our current affairs coverage is too patchy to convert ITN into a true news ticker. ‑ Iridescent 09:40, 19 July 2016 (UTC)
*Those who hark back to the days of Larry Sanger as some kind of golden age would do well to note just how shitty Misplaced Pages was when he was in charge. The 9/11 article read—in full—On the morning of September 11, 2001, what might well be the most devastating terrorist attack in the history of the world occurred concurrently in New York City, Washington, D.C. and near Pittsburgh. Four passengers jets were hijacked and then deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Both towers of the World Trade Center subsequently collapsed and part of the Pentagon was destroyed in the ensuing fire. Casualties are expected to be in the thousands: 266 passengers; about 5000 people, including hundreds of firefighters who had rushed in, at the World Trade Center; and 125 at the Pentagon. Some passengers on the doomed flights were able to make phone calls reporting on events on board. They reported that there were more than one hijacker on each plane, and that they took control of the planes using box-cutter knives. It appears that the passengers on the fourth jet tried to overpower the hijackers and that the plane crashed in a sparsely populated area as a result, thereby missing its intended target which may have been the White House. The attack had immediate and deep global political effects and economic effects; as well as an international outpouring of memorials and services. The massive undertaking of rescue and recovery, and providing assistance to the survivors and victims, is ongoing. There will be a great need for donations for a long time. Though no group has claimed responsibility, the US government immediately launched a full-scale response, stating its intentions to go to war against those responsible. On October 7, a coalition led by the United States launched an attack in Afghanistan. See 2001 U.S. Attack on Afghanistan. Following the attack, the United States has been on heightened alert for new terrorist attacks. In late September, cases of anthrax started breaking out, evidently due to terrorism. See 2001 anthrax attack., and at no point contained anything as prosaic as even a single reference. ‑ Iridescent 09:40, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Octaviano Tenorio

1. Talk:Octaviano Tenorio
2. WP:Articles for deletion/Octaviano Tenorio 2
3. WP:Arbitration/Requests/Case
4. WT:Identifying reliable sources
5. WT:Notability
6. Wikipediocracy

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Hi Iridiscent

Please may I ask you to reconsider your closure of Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Octaviano Tenorio?

It seems to me to be more a supervote than an attempt to weigh the arguments made against policy.

Two points stand out:

1. Your dismissal of the argument that the sources are not independent is cogently argued. However, that argument belonged as a contribution to the AFD rather than a closure rationale, because I am unaware of any policy basis for requiring that policy be interpreted in the way you did. That was a matter for the consensus of the discussion, which the closer should have weighed rather than overridden.
2. Your assertion atht "Misplaced Pages's practice has always been that regardless of the neutrality of sources, if a major religion considers a topic notable there's a prima facie presumption of notability" is again unfounded in policy. That may be your assessment of the practice, but as you know there is a limited number of topic-specific notability guidelines, each of which has been through many, lengthy debates. Given that such notabilty guidelines are so controversial, it seems to me to be very undesirable to pronounce the existence of an unwritten guideline. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:48, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Meh I would have closed it the same way. Demands for 'policy backed reasons' to 'keep' an article at AFD have no weight where the subject is borderline notable, as the GNG is a guideline not a policy. Policy-based arguments are for when an article actually violates any of wikipedia's policies (WP:V, WP:BLP etc). If an article does not violate a policy, no policy can be produced as a reason to 'keep'. Its essentially stonewalling to demand something that is neither required not possible to produce.

That AFD came down to one argument 'Does this person satisfy GNG?'. With the rationale that the sources used, as owned by the LDS, are not independant of the subject. The subject is a person, not the Church of LDS. Plenty of people refuted that the subject was independant of the paper, but that the paper would not be independant of the LDS. So once that argument has been set aside there was little left in the delete arsenal. A delete vote on a faulty premise is low-weight. On a related note, there are more than a few unwritten guidelines regarding deletion, schools are notable, bishops etc. If you want to argue that these 'unwritten' guidelines hold no weight, I look forward to your nomination of the many school, bishop etc articles at AFD. Good luck with that. Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:24, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I don't consider it a supervote—I have no connection whatsoever to either Utah or the Mormons, have never heard of the man before this, and (given that at least half the threads on this page at any given time are people complaining that I'm too eager to delete) am hardly an every-grain-of-sand-on-the-beach inclusionist. I don't see how any neutral observer could have closed that AFD as anything other than either "no consensus" or "weak keep", since there is patently no consensus either way, but the "keep" arguments are stronger. (If you want a thought experiment, would you condone the deletion of Sarah Smeyers and Nele Lijnen because they're sourced only to sources connected to the Belgian government? There are considerably more Mormons than there are Belgians.) If you disagree with the closure, you know where to find WP:Deletion review. ‑ Iridescent 14:35, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Your thinking, as stated by, 'but I consider the primary argument around the definition of "independent source" to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what we mean by "independent of the article subject"' is incorrect. Please review WP:BASIC, the prime consideration for notability. "People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject." According to your thinking, we can now accept PR blurbs from companies trumpeting their hires as proof of notability. That being said, I cannot argue that "no consensus" is an invalid outcome. --NeilN 14:37, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Funnily enough, NeilN, I'm aware of what our policies say; I'm not aware that "NeilN has made up his own definition of independence which this doesn't meet" is currently among them. For the second time, if you disagree with the close DRV is thataway; I imagine the reason you and BHG are here rather than there is because you know perfectly well what the result of a DRV will be. ‑ Iridescent 14:41, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I said the outcome is defensible. And while you may be aware of what out policies say, it seems in this case, it's "Iridescent has decided what they mean". Fair enough. --NeilN 14:50, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Iridiscent, you were quite entitled to refuse to discuss the closure. But your comment I imagine the reason you and BHG are here rather than there is because you know perfectly well what the result of a DRV will be is rather nasty.

As I'm sure you know, the WP:DELREVD is very clear "Before listing a review request, please: 1/ Discuss the matter with the closing administrator and try to resolve it with him or her first.".

So even if I was minded to go straight to DRV rather than having the courtesy to try a discussion with the closer, the lack of prior approach would be clear procedural grounds to speedy-close the DRV.

Approaching you first is evidence of nothing other than following the proper procedure. I'm pretty sure you know that. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:34, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

AGF has a limit; I've known you long enough that I don't doubt your good faith, but equally I'm able to read, and I can see the "keepist conspiracy" thread on your talkpage as well as anyone.

I also don't think for one moment that you actually believe "a source is unreliable if it's associated with the organisation from which the article subject derives their notability", which is the key argument being pushed by those wanting to delete in this case. Not wanting to state the bloody obvious, but if you do get consensus for this I could delete about 50% of the Oireachtas in one sweep under WP:BLPPROD. ‑ Iridescent 17:07, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Sigh. Did you actually read the discussion before you closed it?

The issue here is not reliability; it is independence. It is perfectly possible for a paper to publish only stories which are accurate and reliable, but to

1. focus on its own team, spotlighting people who are part of the organisation which owns them, and ignoring others.
2. publish nothing which might be "unhelpful" to their team

Point #1 is the issue here. The stories published may be accurate; that's not the issue. The point is that if the only paper which which writes about someone is the paper owned by their own team, then we effectively have a case of promotion rather than of notability.

Note that this not the same as the example of The Spectator. The Spec is indeed pro-Conservative, but is not actually owned by the Conservative Party, but despite its partisanship it publishes plenty of tirades against the party. A better comparator would be a paper which was actually owned by a party.

As to the Oireachtas refs ... are you serious? Sure, plenty of those articles are stubs refed only to the Oireachtas database, and their notability is not established. But Irish politicians get a lot of media coverage, which will (hopefully) be added as the articles are expanded. That's why we have WP:NPOL: not because pols are somehow "worthy" of coverage, but because it is pretty much guaranteed that the sources exist, if+when someone does their homework in the newspaper archives. So AFDs would be a waste of everyone's time. (Look! we found the sources which everyone except the nominator said were bound to exist for this topic! Whoopee!). By contrast, most of the keepists in the Tenorio debate agreed that the independent sources do not exist.

Anyway, I'm saddened that you rushed to such a strange close. I thought someone might do a my-opinion-over-the balance-of-the-arguments close, but I never thought it would be you :( That saddens me much more than the AFD outcome. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:06, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

• I'd like to echo BHG's concerns with the close. I'd go so far to say your close was uninformed at best, and a biased supervote at worst. Three reasons why:

1. You essentially unilaterally created a SNG that doesn't exist. There is no SNG in writing that says that all Mormon leaders are automatically notable. A majority of participants in the discussion said that there either wasn't and/or shouldn't be said SNG. There was also an attempt by the creator of the Tenorio article to try and institute said SNG here; there is a solid consensus against instituting said SNG
2. Your close, and in particular your comments above, indicate a lack of understanding of the difference between reliability and independence. We've never argued that Deseret News is unreliable, and we never needed to. We were arguing that Deseret News was not independent from the organization from which Tenorio draws his notability. A solid majority of the participants in the. A side discussion on the indepedence was started by somebody else here; a majority of participants there also agree that Deseret News is not independent of Mormon leaders.
3. You essentially bought in to Carrite's ridiculous claim of harassment (as you continue to do in your comment above), while not only failing to research if it had any merit (Carrite has in fact been baiting me by going around refactoring my comments), but mentioning it in your close, as if closing it as if it was some sort of justified punishment of me and other deletionists. At the same time, you ignored the misbehavior by the keepists, who subjected BHG and I to a bevy of low-level attacks, insinuations of bigotry, and misconstructions of nearly everything we said.

I haven't decided if I'm going to do nothing, relist or DRV yet, but I am greatly displeased with your no consensus close and even more so not only with your rationale, but your comments above. pbp 01:16, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

• You suggested you'd like my opinion. My personal view about the article is an unqualified keep: We've always kept LDS people at this level, on about the same basis we've kept RC bishops. And for religious figures I try to be inclusive in the case of doubt, to avoid the possibility of bias. For any borderline case I can fairly construct a good argument in either direction on their basis of the qualifying adjectives in WP:GNG, which often allow for a wide range of interpretation, because sources do not fall into two neat categories of RS for N and non-RS for N. In such cases, one is basically using the established guidelines not to decide on whether to keep the article, but on justifying the holistic decision on whether one thinks we should or should not keep the article. As for how I would close, I of course do not follow my personal view on sourcing. The people at the AfD, most of them very experienced at WP, had very different views of how to interpret the requirements. The most realistic close in a case like this is non-consensus, if only because its the easiest to defend. I might have considered closing at keep, because I think a centrist view of the sources is that they are sufficiently reliable for the purpose--except because of my own known tendencies in interpretation, it might look like a supervote.

On the basis of experience at Del Rev, NC closes are very rarely overturned unless they are grossly mistaken and against a rational view of the discussion, and I'd almost never advise extending the argument about one there: it's not worth the trouble. If one thinks it should have been delete,its much easier to renominate for deletion. Here, as usual, I'd suggest waiting at least a month or two so animosities can decrease, and tso there will be a better chance of involving other people in the discussion.

Iridescent, that was a magnificiently worded close. But had I seen the discussion, I would have done it a little differently. Any time after the first day or two, I would have made a technical non-consensus close, on the basis that the argument had been productive of so much inappropriate discussion that it would be better started over. This is admittedly IAR, but I've done it a few times in similar circumstances. DGG ( talk ) 03:17, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Brilliant and well-done

Per and the above, um, discussion, I wanted to say THANK YOU and BRAVO! Very well-done and well-reasoned close. Montanabw 22:27, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Deletion review for Octaviano Tenorio

An editor has asked for a deletion review of Octaviano Tenorio. Because you closed the deletion discussion for this page, speedily deleted it, or otherwise were interested in the page, you might want to participate in the deletion review. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:46, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

To return or not to return?

I want to stay away from ITN seriously. However, I read The Rambling Man's rationale for opposing the posting of Betsy Bloomingdale's death. Why should "quality" equal to a lot of content or something? I just had an urge to rebut his argument by "supporting" the posting because... I don't like equating article quality with something unimportant that we omitted or overlooked. --George Ho (talk) 03:47, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

You obviously didn't read my weak oppose. Or at least you didn't understand it. I said that there was a 36-year gap in the article which meant I felt it lacked comprehensive coverage of her life. That's what I said. It would surprise no-one to see you at ITN after declaring you would never come back. Sorry to use up your talkpage, Iridescent, for such trivialities. The Rambling Man (talk) 08:09, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Crossing out my comments; Spencer's argument on the article quality was more convincing. Therefore, I confirm my previous decision to stay away from ITN for now. --George Ho (talk) 17:02, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Not important at all. I'm afraid no-one's interested in that. Just you. See you in a few days when you decide to declare a similar thing. The Rambling Man (talk) 18:17, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

George Ho, nobody except you cares whether you participate in any given area of Misplaced Pages, provided you don't make a nuisance in said area. (If you want to do something in a heavily backlogged area in which a few people can make a real difference, might I recommend WP:RFD, which is bursting at the seams?) I don't know why you keep asking me these questions rather than your mentors, or where you've got the idea that I'm some kind of big cheese at WP:ITN, given that I've made a grand total of one edit to Template:In the news in the past decade and have spent most of that decade arguing that it should be deprecated altogether. ‑ Iridescent 20:19, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

I don't have any more mentors. I have one, but he thinks I'm near hopeless. As you said, no one wants to be my mentor anymore; they think I'm beyond help. I didn't think you were ITN cheese or anything. I figured that you would be more friendly. However, your "suggestions" seem to mock me or insult me. If you don't have any real suggestions, I guess I talked to the wrong person. George Ho (talk) 20:27, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

George, stop this. It's not benefiting anyone, especially not yourself. No-one actually believes what you say any more, and your continued self-pity is really not something that other Wikipedians should be forced to deal with. If you're not enjoying this, stop doing it. It's not like you've been conscripted or forced into hard labour. Just go and do something else instead. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:33, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I have literally no idea what you're talking about here; the only suggestion I've made is that WP:RFD needs more help, given that one of its most active participants has recently left Misplaced Pages, and the relatively low-tempo traffic there makes it an environment in which one extra person is considerably more likely to make a useful difference than in the cesspit of WP:ITN/C (in which the arguments are peculiarily pointless, since the end reeult of any discussion will become irrelevant a couple of days later regardless). I don't see how anyone get "mocking or insulting" out of that; I can assure you that if I were mocking or insulting anyone, there's a large archive-box worth of admins immediately above who would welcome a pretext to block me. ‑ Iridescent 20:37, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

My apologies, Iridescent. Thanks for verifying your seriousness. Maybe I'll look into RFD if I can, but I have other things to do in real-life. George Ho (talk) 20:43, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Deletion of {{Persondata}}

Hi Iridescent,

I'm the bot who is deleting {{Persondata}}. I noticed your edit on Bianca Gray in which you added {{Persondata}}. This template is deprecated and deleted. Please stop adding {{Persondata}}. In case you want to support the Persondata project you can help with the migration of the dataset to Wikidata at KasparBot's tool. See Misplaced Pages:Persondata or contact my operator T.seppelt in case you have any questions.

Thank you very much, -- KasparBot (talk) 01:01, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

I know it's not your fault, bot, but the fact that I'm the one who gets a warning for reverting vandalism, rather than the two human editors who edited it in the meantime apparently without noticing (or without caring) that the article read in full Bianca "Extra Cheese" Gray. Good friends with an asian girl that goes by the name of Phuong "No extra cheese i can't afford it" Le., embodies the reasons Misplaced Pages has a reputation for being unwelcome. How would a new editor feel if fixing this error had inspired them to create a Misplaced Pages account, and the first message they receive on joining was this? ‑ Iridescent 09:06, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Talking to bots again, are we? :-) I just spent too many minutes reading the DRV of an AfD you closed recently. Who would have thought that would generate so much heat? Carcharoth (talk) 15:50, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Would it be the DRV about which I'm being ranted at here, by any chance? That's a genuinely weird one; as I point out above, it was obvious before it even opened what the result would be, but everyone feels obliged to go through the motions nonetheless. It would probably make quite a good case study of Misplaced Pages's bureaucracy-for-bureaucracy's-sake. ‑ Iridescent 16:05, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Have now got distracted by Misplaced Pages:Supervote... Carcharoth (talk) 17:49, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

I thought everyone knew that "supervote" is defined as "closing a discussion with any result other than the one I wanted"? (Was it Kelly Martin who said that whenever you hear someone claim "admin abuse", you can be sure they're abusing an admin?) This incident has prompted me to read closely, for the first time in a long time, the ludicrous WP:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions. I'm sure I've read a more self-important and misguided crock of nonsense somewhere, but I can't think where. ‑ Iridescent 18:01, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

That essay has 62(!) section headings. That must be some sort of record. Carcharoth (talk) 18:14, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Take it you've not read Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style—currently 165 section headings on the first page alone, not to mention the 70-odd separate subpages covering such weighty matters as Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style/Road junction lists, Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style/Stringed instrument tunings and Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style/Snooker. I'm sure if you printed the whole thing out, it would actually be longer than the Chicago Manual of Style. ‑ Iridescent 21:14, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

I generally avoid the MOS like the plague. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:16, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

It's worth paying attention to, if only to explain why you're choosing to ignore it, but I find that even at FA level, there's no real reason to comply with most of it provided you can justify not doing so should anyone ask. It's well beyond the size that anyone could reasonably be expected to read it—I get the feeling its main use nowadays is as a heatsink for the obsessives to have their arguments and thus keep them away from the rest of us (c.f. Wikidata, Arbitration Enforcement, Wikiversity). ‑ Iridescent 21:22, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Talking of the MOS, I noticed a recent edit where someone changed USA to United States "per MOS:NOTUSA". So I went and read that. Am now trying to find out if there was a long bitter discussion about that, or whether someone just changed it following a short discussion somewhere. At some point, I adopted a 'personal' style of writing "US" (as an adjective) instead of "American" (as American is too vague) and "USA", and I almost never use "United States", because a little voice in my head instinctively asks "United States of what?". Ah well, I suppose there is a good reason for having a little rule like that in the MOS... Oh dear, the discussion starts back in archive 1, has its own subpage from 2003 and another one from 2006, and a massively detailed quote-laden discussion last year, that is not a good sign... Carcharoth (talk) 05:24, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

Without even looking, I can predict every name that will be in that thread. Life's too short to spend any of it talking with the MOS obsessives or the hyphenation brigade; just write as you see fit, and let the bots fight it out among themselves over the formatting. ‑ Iridescent 13:23, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

DYK for Mondongo (collective)

On 25 July 2016, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Mondongo (collective), which you recently nominated. The fact was ... that the Black Series by Argentinian art collective Mondongo used cookies and crackers to recreate pornographic images from the internet? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Mondongo (collective). You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, daily totals), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:46, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Bottlers ‑ Iridescent 15:20, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Deletion of Akun Sabharwal

Hi Iridescent,

I'm not sure why this page(Akun Sabharwal) is deleted. Can you please help me restore it? I need your help.

Thanks, Nischal Sureshnischal (talk) 11:07, 26 July 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sureshnischal (talk • contribs) 11:03, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

I've undeleted it, and sent it to Articles for Deletion for a further discussion. You can join the discussion at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Akun Sabharwal. ‑ Iridescent 15:04, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Question from Davidgoodheart

Hi Misplaced Pages administrator Iridescent, I have a question for you: If there is an article about a wrestling tag team or a band, and a member of tag team or band is no longer living should (deceased) be put beside their name?

User:DavidgoodheartDavidgoodheart (talk) 05:24, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

It depends on the circumstances. I'd say in general yes in the "list of members" section, no in the infobox (if there is one) and never in the body text, and if the situation is complicated have a separate subpage explaining when each person was active and when they died. See Fleetwood Mac#Members, The Fall (band)#Members or Pink Floyd#Members for examples of different approaches towards how to format it. ‑ Iridescent 08:48, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

The infobox for Grateful Dead lists all band members as "Past members" whether they're dead or merely resting, which kinda implies that the Dead carried on after all its members left. Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 11:09, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Although it looks jarring, that's technically correct. Everyone resigned from the band when Jerry Garcia died, but the surviving members still tour under the Dead name. ‑ Iridescent 11:17, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Sourcing awards list

Having failed to find anything in the labryinth of policy pages, I'm asking here as an article I recently tried to improve (see Stamford Raffles Award) got tagged as relying too much on primary sources. I was a bit stumped by this, as awards articles and list articles generally do use primary sources to verify the entries on a list such as this (the text of the citations is a bit more iffy and probably raises copyright concerns, though the Nobel Prize lists have long quoted the citations in full). Has there been a misunderstanding somewhere about what primary sourcing means here? FWIW, that is a lower level award (I work a lot on various science and engineering awards) and the top level award from that society is Frink Medal, but not sure what the right approach is here.

When I look at the various awards articles I've worked on they are a bit of a mixed bunch: Linus Pauling Award that's a good start, tagged for notability; Franklin Medal; Benjamin Franklin Medal (some renaming has messed things up a bit here - you can see why the institute changed the award name to Franklin Institute Awards); Howard N. Potts Medal; Heinrich Wieland Prize; Janssen Medal (French Academy of Sciences), Prix Jules Janssen, Stuart Ballantine Medal, Michelson–Morley Award, James Bryant Conant Award, J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize, Leidy Award, Hayden Memorial Geological Award. OK, I'll stop there...

I have some other lists of similar nature lurking in my userspace (there is something alluring about wikilinking such lists and seeing which links are blue and which are red and working out which redlinks we actually have articles for if you look carefully enough). Such lists are useful, but is there a simple page to point people at that explains this? I am wondering how much of the guidance at Template:List navbox will be useful? I've long assumed that a list consisting mostly of people who have articles will not cause notability concerns, but am I wrong to assume that? Carcharoth (talk) 19:37, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

One of the many problems with WP:PRIMARY is that it prefers reports by the world's least reliable profession to official announcements, which are usually better for strictly factual matters that the issuing organization has done, as here. Johnbod (talk) 01:51, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Indeed; if you (Carcharoth) have a long memory you may remember my complaints during round one of the COI Wars back when MyWikiBiz appeared about the inconsistency of our welcoming the most gushing waffle from hyper-biased fans providing they can dig up a press cutting somewhere, but treating neutral updates on film release dates, band discographies, company opening dates etc as having been vomited into Misplaced Pages by Beelzebub himself should they happen to be sourced to something connected to the subject.

WP:NOR is possibly the single most misunderstood line of policy on Misplaced Pages; a lot of people interpret it as "anything which isn't sourced to something completely unrelated to the subject should be deleted", and don't really understand the nuanced wording of Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. A primary source may only be used on Misplaced Pages to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge. Instead, a lot of people who should know better treat "primary source" as "source added by an editor I dislike" or "any source on an article I don't consider notable".

Because of the WMF's "world's largest encyclopedia" puffery and the "💕" strapline, people tend to forget that "encyclopedia" is only one-third of the "Misplaced Pages is a combination of an encyclopedia, an almanac and a gazetteer" trinity (albeit the most important third), and primary sources are often completely appropriate for neutral gazetteer and almanac entries; the whole "neutral third-party source" gubbins is for writing about the interpretation of facts, not for stating the facts themselves.

Regarding the intent behind the policy, you want SlimVirgin, who to all practical purposes is responsible for the sourcing policies in their current form. Some of the sports projects—who are used to writing about fields with multiple levels of awards of varying degrees of prestige—would probably be well-placed to comment on how we treat award-winner lists in practice, as would the people at WT:Featured list candidates who are presumably used to deciding whether lists are appropriately sourced. ‑ Iridescent 15:28, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. It's a myth that the policies warn against primary sources. They're often the best sources to use. You just have to be careful to use authoritative ones, and don't do anything too outlandish with them. And if it's a contentious or difficult area, make sure you know how the secondary sources use them. SarahSV 18:12, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. Turned out the Stamford Raffles Award was more interesting than it seems. The first few awards were sculptures by Henry Moore. A limited edition of eight. But the cost of the insurance even when kept securely in a safe was prohibitive, so at some point the remaining ones were sold and they switched to sculptures by a less, um, desirable, sculptor (who doesn't have an article: Anita Mandl). As for whether secondary sources are reliable when it comes to awards articles, don't get me started! Often the sources contradict each other if the award is announced one year and awarded the following year. In really bad cases, the organisation itself gets confused and 'misses' a year. Often the organisation will have a web page that moves around at random and or disappears as the website gets redesigned every year. Sometimes the organisation no longer exists and the reports of the awards in contemporary news sources (or rather science journals) are more reliable, or the only existing record. Unless some meta-gazetteer has picked up on them (such as Winners, the blue ribbon encyclopedia of awards ). With the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize, that was awarded in an unbroken sequence from 1969 to 1984 and then stopped for some reason that doesn't seem to have been reported (they may have just decided to stop, or ran out of money, or something). The Michelson–Morley Award is puzzling. It was resurrected in 2002 after a ten year gap, awarded then and again in 2003, and then it stopped again. I suppose there is little incentive to report the details of why these things happen. Carcharoth (talk) 22:05, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:The Core Contest is a good case study as to how these things happen! Johnbod (talk) 00:55, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Richhill A.F.C.

You deleted Richhill A.F.C. without consulting me as the creator. This club meets the notability requirements at WP:FOOTY by virtue of playing in the national cup competition of Northern Ireland. Are you able to restore the article? Thanks. Mooretwin (talk) 14:37, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

I see you have restored it. Many thanks. Mooretwin (talk) 14:52, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

I've just noticed that A.F.C. Silverwood was also deleted - same case applies as above re notability requirements. Grateful if you could also restore that one. Mooretwin (talk) 14:55, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

I've restored them procedurally as de facto contested prods, but note that there's no expectation that admins closing deletions should "consult with the creator" before deleting, nor is there any chance that such a proposal would be accepted—do you realise how many deletions take place on Misplaced Pages each day? (For what it's worth, I for once agree with User:SwisterTwister here that both should be deleted and that neither will survive a deletion discussion in their current state; the only cited fact on the articles is the fact that the clubs exist. Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Football/Notability is a personal essay, not any kind of policy, and much as some of their members may wish otherwise WP:FOOTY does not have and never has had the power to overrule Misplaced Pages's fundamental requirements on sourcing and verifiability. Misplaced Pages's actual guidance on the notability of sports teams is "A team is notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in secondary sources. Such sources must be reliable, and independent of the subject. A single independent source is almost never sufficient for demonstrating the notability of an organization.") ‑ Iridescent 15:01, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

ANI

Please either close the discussion or block someone (or both). History is pretty clear its just going to go on and on and devolve into more arguing over content. If I hatted everything in that thread that was about content, it would be a fifth the length.... I have hatted the racism offtopic because a)it is, b)its ridiculous to claim nationality/ethnicity based attacks are not racism when almost every definition of it (as well as a number of laws in most western countries) says it is. I dont particularly want you to get dragged into an argument with someone over it and derail the thread even more. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:13, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

I've commented in the thread, so I can't close it, and it would probably be inappropriate for me to block those involved given that I'm one of the targets of Mathsci's insinuations so am WP:INVOLVED if it comes to blocking him, and the only realistic closure options are "block Mathsci", "block both of them", or "topic ban them both given that the article in question is heavily-edited and will get on perfectly well without either of them". WP:ANI#User Mathsci and all the things, should any uninvolved TPW feel the urge to have someone shout at them for the next week for not closing it with the result they wanted. ‑ Iridescent 15:25, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

On a related note, the thread at WPO contains nothing of interest. Mainly griping by one of his old enemies. Its not 'hidden' in the sense of 'super secret' its just in an non-google-bot crawlable subforum where the dirty laundry goes. You should join, I suspect you would probably be welcomed. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:55, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Has any thread at WPO ever contained anything of interest? I may be being deeply unfair, but the distinct impression I get is that the terms of the divorce settlement were that WR got the semicoherent lunatics who wanted to write thousand-word essays about their crank theories, while WPO got the bar-room bores who've compiled a bulleted list of every time anyone on Misplaced Pages said something with which they disagreed and would like to discuss this list with anyone in earshot. The old WR may have been infested with weirdos, but beneath the veneer of crazies there was genuine thoughtfulness and a willingness to engage between both the "Misplaced Pages is irredeemable and must be destroyed" and the "Misplaced Pages is fixable, we just need to find out how to fix it" factions; the impression I get from my (admittedly limited) skims of WPO is that it's just a bunch of people whining about whoever the last person with whom they happened to have an argument happens to be. ‑ Iridescent 16:07, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

It varies. The technical discussions are very useful as WPO has quite a few technically qualified (as opposed to merely experienced) users. So the breakdown threads of the WMF's various abortions of 'upgrades' are often illuminating. Over time the 'whining about whoever last argument' people do get weeded out. WPO tolerates a higher amount of what would be considered "Personal attacks" but it does not really tolerate completely disruptive people for very long. There is a correlation between editors banned from wikipedia for being disruptive who end up banned from WPO, and editors banned from wikipedia for policy violation (paid editing for example). The former tend to annoy people at WPO as much as they do here with a similar outcome, the latter not so much. As a consequence however it also allows much greater scrutiny of problematic editors (see Qworty etc) than Misplaced Pages policy generally allows for (or rather, restricts to arbcom). This could be a good or bad thing depending on your opinion. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:18, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

The volume of contributions, and their level of interest and utility, seems to have been in decline for a long time, with a steeper decline over the last year or so. Johnbod (talk) 17:19, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

In fairness, the same could probably be said of Misplaced Pages. Presumably WPO suffers from the same problem as Misplaced Pages, of being dominated by an old guard, but WPO doesn't have the lebensraum of Misplaced Pages. On WP, if you get fed up with a particular area you can generally find something else to do; on WPO, presumably if you lose interest in hearing the fascinating "I was banned from a conference I didn't intend to go to anyway!" anecdote for the hundredth time*, there's nowhere else to go but out. ‑ Iridescent 18:42, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

*At least, I assume this has been posted at least a hundred times. Certainly, whenever I've looked at WPO some variant on it always seems to be in at least one of the three most recent threads.

I have no account on wikipediocracy

I have no account on wikipediocracy and have never given that impression. I am banned from there, as far as I remember since 2012. You have jumped to untrue conclusions possibly by reading things too fast. Please read this User talk:Stanistani#Request. There I posted a request to Stanistani, the admin on WPO, that a thread about me be made private. You seem to have got the wrong end of the stick. I have also made a request to arbitrators about Only in death's edits. He wrote a false statement about me on WP:ANI. Incidentally I have prepared my diffs and am waiting your response at WP:ANI. They are in an unsaved section on my user talk page where I chose to gather them. They are just a raw list of diffs with dates from the talk page of the article. Thanks in advance, Mathsci (talk) 18:21, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Go away and play whatever game you're playing with someone else; as I've already said, I am not willing to engage with you. If you have any accusations to make about me or anyone else, I'm sure you know how to find Arbcom by now. ‑ Iridescent 18:25, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

What game are you talking about? I am banned from wikipediocracy, yet you wrote the contrary. What game are you talking about? And here are the raw diffs which I started preparing last night.

• 19 July 2016

• 22 July 2016

• 26 July 2016

• 27 July 2016

• 1 August 2016

Please stop acting in such bad faith. Thanks, Mathsci (talk) 18:32, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

You can also have the full annotated list of 67 diffs if you want. Thanks, Mathsci (talk) 18:36, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

And yes the request for oversight was made by email to Casliber. Nothing to do with you or your comments. Please, please, please assume good faith. Thanks, Mathsci (talk) 18:46, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Do you really want to do this?

1. is TJW owing up to checking the wrong source;
2. , , are a correct summary of Misplaced Pages policy;
3. is TJW agreeing with you;
4. and are TJW (correctly) pointing out that your attitude towards people with whom you disagree is itself inappropriate;
5. and are TJW correctly removing a copyright violation, while is TJW explaining why you can't post copyright violations on Misplaced Pages;
6. is a (correct) conduct warning, given that you'd already committed a blockable offense and edit-warred to keep it in, and is his explaining why;
7. is you inserting yet another copyvio (for the record, this is the point at which I'd have indefblocked you had I had the page on my watchlist);
8. I don't know what on earth you're claiming is problematic about or ;
9. is a (correct) statement of Misplaced Pages policy on the use of primary sources;
10. is a refutation of the (bizarre and incorrect) claim that video cannot be considered a reliable source;
11. is a (correct) explanation of what the MOS says about linking within quotations;
12. and are a request for a second opinion and subsequent discussion on whether "complicité" should actually be translated as "complicity" (which has a specific legal meaning in English);
13. and and are TJW reverting obvious personal attacks from you (this is the second point at which I'd have indefblocked you had I been watching the page);
14. is snappy, but by this point it would try the patience of a saint to be dealing with you, and in light of all that went before I'd consider "ownership issues" a statement of fact, not an attack.

If this is the best dirt you can dig up, I strongly suggest you issue Timothyjosephwood a grovelling apology. I can say with near-certainty that if this winds up at Arbcom and the above is the best evidence you have, the only discussion will be whether your lifetime ban from Misplaced Pages will have the possibility of appeal a couple of years down the line. (And I have no idea what you mean about oversight.)

If you do want to discuss this further, please do so somewhere else. ‑ Iridescent 19:11, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

• Re Oversight he is referring to my pointing out he was banned for harrassment of Cla. Nothing to do with you. Apologies you have to deal with this. Only in death does duty end (talk) 19:13, 3 August 2016 (UTC)